A short comment on one of Pedro’s suggestions. From: Fis [mailto:fis-boun...@listas.unizar.es] On Behalf Of Pedro C. Marijuan Sent: Friday, April 15, 2016 11:01 AM To: 'fis' <fis@listas.unizar.es> Subject: [Fis] Meaning in neurosceinces
Dear FIS colleagues, [John Collier] … clip The suggestion (to all) is to explore whether phi, rather than relating it to the emergence of consciousness, would relate to the emergence of meaning. All the fast circulating activations and inhibitions between neural mappings, usually involving opposing flows of neuronal "energy" and informational "entropy", when they finally "click" and achieve convergence on an optimized state, it represents the collective achievement of meaning. Thus, phi would be a highly dynamic, fluctuating indicator showing the evolution of the cascades of meaning. Let us imagine the thresholds pointed by Bob in ecological networks, but circulating at a fiendish speed (could values of phi and resilience indexes have similar nature?) [John Collier] Interesting suggestion, Pedro. I have read a bit about phi, and it seems to me to be sound, but I really need to investigate it at greater depth. Assuming it is sound, I have been unclear what it has to do with consciousness. Conciousness doesn’t seem to me to be a property that admits of degrees (one can be conscious of more or less, but not more or less conscious is my worry here). However the suggestion that it has to do with meaning seems to me to be more appealing, since meaning can come in degrees I would think – my objection above to degrees of consciousness does not seem to apply so readily. Certainly some works of art (poetry, especially) are more meaningful than others, and I would think that applies to representations in general, e.g., of the colour red compared to being coloured. If we think that meaning requires an interpretant (I do, though I am not sure that anything with an interpretant is meaningful), then the interpretant can vary both in scope and specificity. A very general interpretant has a broad scope (think, for example, of the final interpretant of a functional trait, which is in the preservation of the autonomy of whatever bears it compared to the immediate interpretant of the trait, which will be a specific goal or end). I think that specificity is related, but not on the same dimension: functions might be more or less specific, but might well have a common final interpretant, with the same scope resulting. I am pretty sure it is easy to come up with linguistic examples as well (e.g., mass considered in the scope of physical theory compared to mass as something measured, and mass-energy and the more specific mass alone). This fits fairly well with my understanding of Bob’s work as well, though I am not so ready to use the notion of meaning there, but there is something similar. John
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